72 Hours Without TV or Internet

My husband and I returned yesterday afternoon from a long weekend away. We spent the time recharging and relaxing at a bed and breakfast near Lake Geneva, WI. It was really nice just to have the time off and to have a bit of balance in our lives. My mother seemed a little baffled that Dave and I chose to go somewhere without TV. She could manage 3 days without a computer fine (although my parents do travel with a laptop pretty much everywhere), but TV would be much harder for her. For me, missing the computer and the connection to the world was much more difficult. But there’s certainly a generational difference there: My parents get their news from print newspapers and the TV; I get mine all through RSS. It was a little weird not having any idea what was happening in the world all weekend.

Mostly, I really just enjoyed relaxing, being on the beach, reading in our room, and hanging out with Dave. Saturday morning we visited the Yerkes Observatory, the largest refracting telescope in the world. I remember taking the tour of the observatory growing up, and it was fun to see it again. We even bought a little piece of meteorite (yeah, totally touristy, but the money supports the observatory). I love that this telescope that was built over 100 years ago is still making contributions to science and education.

Do you think that anything we write and create now on our blogs and wikis and online videos and networking profiles will still be educating people in 100 years?

3 thoughts on “72 Hours Without TV or Internet”

That’s an interesting idea; if humanity has evolved past the point where our ideas are directly being used, that does imply forward progress.

After I posted that last night, I was also wondering if maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. I was thinking about our ideas in their current form having direct impact, as if they were self-contained nuggets that would persist without being changed at all. I don’t think that’s right though; that’s really counter to the whole point of the blogging community.

Once our ideas are out there, other people get them and play with them and reshape them and combine them with somebody else’s ideas. It becomes difficult (if not impossible) to trace where any idea originally started, and that’s OK. The ideas can still be out there influencing people and making them think, but in whatever form they have been shaped (and continue to be shaped) by the community.

Part of me wonders whether it really matters whether the stuff we create “educates” in 1 – 100 years…

If our stuff becomes obsolete it tells me that there is at least some evolution occurring in our thinking – and we are learning from each other. Even better – if our stuff is being superceded by someone else, that means that for that brief moment in time, our ideas are being engaged and processed.

I suspect we are also looking at a different form of invention – Material vs. Intellectual. It’s the tools that seem to stick (I personally wonder if “Flash” will be around 100 years from now) – not the content…..